Xbox Game Pass is reportedly still hovering around 30 million subscribers

Back during the early days of Xbox Game Pass, Microsoft had expressed its hopes for the game subscription service to grow into a major player across all of entertainment, wanting the platform to one day reach as many as 100 million subscribers. In the years since, not only has the industry changed in many ways, but so too has Game Pass itself. Even so, it appears as though the service is struggling to break past its ceiling – with Game Pass reportedly still stuck at around 30 million subscribers.

In a report by The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) discussing Microsoft’s recent Xbox shake-ups, the publication revealed that the console maker had “projected Game Pass subscriptions would reach around 77 million this year”. Unfortunately for Xbox, they are far from reaching this goal, with the publication reporting that Game Pass “currently has about 30 million, a person familiar with the matter said.”

For some context, Microsoft announced back in early 2022 that Game Pass had reached 25 million subscribers. Two years later, the company revealed that the figure had jumped to 34 million subscribers.

While initially seen as a solid amount of growth, this increase came in the wake of Microsoft’s Game Pass overhaul – in which previous Xbox Live Gold members were transitioned over to Game Pass.

Since then, Microsoft made further changes to Game Pass: Hiked up its price massively (losing millions of subscribers in the meantime); added Call of Duty; removed Call of Duty and brought prices back down slightly.

While it is safe to assume that Xbox will likely never reach its 100 million Game Pass subscriber maker, CEO Asha Sharma has recently expressed even more ambitious goals – wanting Xbox to one day have over 1 Billion daily active users. We will have to wait and see whether either of these pipe-dreams come true.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Game Pass in 2026? Has it run its course? Will the service ever grow to 100 million subscribers? Let us know down below.

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